A skull, a tulip and an hour-glass adorn the cover of this release, a grim memento mori but not one which anyone should allow to put them off. With Lalande’s handsome settings of texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah interspersed with eloquent instrumental tombeaux by Marais, Robert de Visee and Louis Couperin, this is an exquisite and deftly planned programme which, unlike many a 70-minute CD, repays listening to from beginning to end.
Like Couperin, Lalande left only three Lecons de Tenebres out of the possible nine, scored for solo voices and continuo. Though they resemble the better-known Couperin settings in many ways, they probably predate them by several years (although there are signs of later revision), having reportedly been performed by his two daughters, who both died of smallpox in 1711. Compared to those of Couperin, Lalande’s Lecons are more energetic and rhythmic; Lalande was a keen observer of text in his sacred music, and where Couperin achieves an aching but rather objective beauty, he is more gestural and in places more impassioned. Listen, for example, to the fierce treatment of “the rod of his wrath” in the second Lecon, or the silences which illustrate the words “attendite et videte” in the first. It is an approach which is matched by the intelligent and expressive singing of Isabelle Desrochers, a soprano whose voice is pretty if slightly hard, but who really touches the heart with her ardent yet controlled delivery of this music. She is not always the most fluid or accurate of singers, but the urgency with which she implores Jerusalem to “turn to the Lord thy God” at the end of the third Lecon is not easily forgotten.
The accompaniment is nicely varied throughout, and the instrumental items are well played, in particular the imaginative gamba solos. Although there are occasional signs in the editing (and even in the presence of a wrong note in the accompaniment) that the recording might have benefited from having a little more time spent on it, this is basically a beautiful disc which any civilized person ought to find life-enhancing.'